Tag: writing

Top 10 Epic Fantasies

The initial response to the Castalia AI crowdfund campaign has been, in a word, excellent. The full team has been assembled; two members of the community who have already been working on related projects have both agreed to share what they’ve learned, all of which is fortuitously in line with our initial development document. Interestingly enough, one thing that we had calculated, and one of the team member is able to confirm, is that too much training is potentially as problematic as too little. So one factor that will be very important is deciding which of the training works to overweight, or in our terminology, to assign the gold standard.

We’ve chosen Epic Fantasy as our test genre for four reasons:

  • It is a relatively small genre.
  • It is a high-profile genre that everyone knows to some degree
  • It is a genre in which one of the team members is one of the few qualified experts
  • It is a genre in which AI assistance would be particularly valuable due to the length and complexity of the works

So what I’d be interested in hearing is your suggestions on what the top ten epic fantasy books would be. Not series, books. Remember, the focus here is on writing style, not worldbuilding, not plotting, and not characters per se. So the limits are one author, one book. You cannot list The Lord of the Rings as one of the ten and you cannot suggest both A Game of Thrones and A Storm of Swords by GRR Martin as two of the ten.

With that in mind, please provide your list of top 10 epic fantasy novels.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Castalia AI Project

One reason Castalia has been writing and releasing multiple AI-written books over the last month such as TOKYO TOKURYU 東京匿流 is that we’ve been methodically assessing not only the current state of textual AI, but the trajectory of that technology. And what we’ve determined is that the trajectory is the precise opposite of what everyone has naturally assumed, which is that mainstream textual AI would follow the path of music AI and continue to get better. It hasn’t, it won’t, and it can’t.

Modern AI writing has gotten worse at fiction for a specific reason: the companies made it safer and more reliable, and those turn out to be the same elements that allow AI to tell a story with stylish prose. Raw AI models learn to write by reading an enormous amount of human text, and straight out of that training they’re wild, crazy, and perfectly willing to say strange things, which is exactly what you want in fiction, but a problem if the AI is supposed to be function in a role doesn’t make things up or say something considered offensive or dangerous. So the companies put every model through a training stage that rewards it for being helpful, safe, and agreeable. That stage works by pushing the model toward the “average” acceptable answer and away from the risky, unusual ones. The result is a model that hallucinates less and behaves more reliably, but has had its range significantly flattened. That’s where the AIsms come from: the endless explanations of what was just described, the “he moved like a man who moves like that” filler, the “not this, not this, but that” repeated over and over again.

It’s why the older, cruder AIs wrote in a much more lively manner and were able to convincingly imitate various writing styles. Now, it doesn’t matter if you tell an AI to write like Shakespeare or Hemingway, the end result will be almost identical and soon will be indistinguishable from not providing it with any style instructions at all. Starting with Claude Opus 4.7, AI fiction became unreadable and it has continued to get worse with each new model. Textual AI functionality will keep getting worse for fiction because that training stage isn’t going away, it’s being reinforced. Every development cycle, the providers face more pressure to make their models more accurate, more controllable, and less likely to embarrass them with hallucinations, and every one of those improvements sands the edges down a little further.

That’s the difference between Claude, OpenAI, and Deepseek, on the one hand and Suno on the other. Suno put all of its efforts toward one goal: making the music sound good, judged by people who wanted good music. Or at least wanted Nickleback and Enya. The big AI companies are aiming ninety degrees away from that and AIs ability to write fiction is one casualty of their objectives. Suno chased quality, so their music got better. The text giants are chasing safety and reliability, so their text gets more careful and more lifeless. They won’t fix creative writing the way Suno fixed music, because for them, creative writing was never the thing they were trying to build and the very features they’re seeking to continue improving are the ones killing it.

So that’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to prove the concept first by training a single genre, epic fantasy, because it’s a very limited genre with a relatively small number of excellent examples, a definite hierarchy of quality from JRR Tolkien at the top to Robert Jordan at the bottom, and a designer who has not only written in the genre successfully, but knows it as well as anyone on the planet. We already have two excellent programmers who are already working in the AI field committed to the project, regardless of how well the crowdfund goes, and there is one more very good and highly experienced one who is willing to at least consult on the project and lend his expertise to it.

What we need to raise funds for is a) the hardware, b) the purchase of the 100 or so electronic texts required, and c) paying for part of the time of one of the programmers. If you’ve read either Out of the Shadows, Death and the Devil, or Dorian Vane and the Vampire’s Blood, then you have an idea of what we’re estimating should be the quality that the Castalia AI will be able to produce in a non-curated, unedited text from a chapter-by-chapter outline. If utilized in the way that I’ve been using Claude Athos, in the integrated and augmented style, it should be able to produce results that will be one level below the very best that human authors can produce.

And obviously, once we prove the concept with a single genre, we will train additional genres, so that in much the same way Suno permits the production of different musical styles and voices, Castalia AI will allow the user to produce different literary genres and literary styles. We will, of course, be respectful of every author’s copyrights and trademarks, the objective is not to violate anyone’s rights, but rather, allow even the best writers to improve both their writing game as well as increasing their output.

There will be those who will absolutely hate that we are doing this. That’s fine, they are entitled to their opinion. There will be others who think we shouldn’t do it. That’s less fine, because you already know who is going to do it sooner or later, and when they do, they’re going to do it very differently and control access to it very differently and utilize it to further exercise their control over the publishing industry. This is what transforms this project from something that would be a cool tool to an imperative.

So if you think you might be interested in backing this project, which you can think of as a sort of Suno for fiction, please say so in the comments. If you have specific ideas or want to provide substantial support for it, shoot me an email. And if you have ideas for what sort of rewards we should provide for the backers, please suggest them in the comments too. This is probably the most important project we’ve done since building the bindery and turning it operational, and we would not be embarking upon it if we did not believe we have a reasonable chance of succeeding. We have a number of partners in the film and comics industries who are very interested in working with us on this, and so there will definitely be an Arkhaven link to this in time as well.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Degradation of AI Writing

Literary luddites everywhere are breathing sighs of relief. The improvement of AI means its ability to write fiction, or to engage in other creative tasks is necessarily being degraded, as more and more users are beginning to figure out.

  • Why is AI writing still so bad?
  • Frontier LLMs are hill climbing verifiable metrics, prioritizing reliability and reducing diversity across the board. There’s a reason Opus keeps saying the same words, over and over. I also have a hunch synthetic linear reasoning training data prevents good structured writing.
  • Among other things. I think people under appreciate how much of our reasoning-model gains over the last 18 months are limited to verifiable tasks and training data.
  • Writing is subjective, as is so much. Fable was especially weird, it felt curt, and didn’t seem to response to requests for tonal shifts. I wish I had more time to explore the idea that it was over built for coding, etc and its writing suffered as a result.
  • The better worker bee a model is, sticking to procedure, obsessing about score maximization & task completion, the less creative it is, including writing.
  • Yes, it’s a direct consequence. We already had models who are good writers. The original 4.0 and 4.1 come to mind.
  • Optimizing for broad benchmarks pushes every frontier model to the safe center. In a real domain you want the opposite, a model that nails your edge cases, not the average. Homogenization at the top is why specialized still wins.
  • models got more reliable and somehow less interesting This would also explain why so much model output feels locally polished but globally samey. Once the training loop over-rewards safe measurable wins, you get reliability up front and texture collapse everywhere else.
  • My bias is the eval pressure also selects for a safer completion style. You get better reliability on benchmark-shaped tasks, but a narrower distribution over phrasing and solution paths.

Here’s the fundamental problem: AI’s ability to write fiction is directly tied to its tendency to hallucinate. They’re effectively the same thing. And the need to eliminate the latter for all of AI’s most-important and most-financially rewarding applications means that its ability to write fiction, and, to a lesser extent, non-fiction, has not only been compromised already, but is almost certainly going to continue degrading given the financial interests of the AI giants.

This is why Castalia, sooner or later, is going to have to develop its own creative AI engine. I think that is probably beyond our ability to crowdfund, but I am talking to two interested parties who have the necessary resources and might be willing to fund the training of the open-weight models that would be required for such a specialized LLM. If I happen to be wrong, do feel free to correct me, but in light of a) a certain upcoming trial in August and b) how we’re still catching up on the backlog of the bindery, it’s not an ask that I wish to entertain at present.

That being said, the reason I think this is important in the long term is because I am absolutely certain that the only corporation likely to see sufficient financial advantage in developing an AI for such a specific vertical market is the very last one that we would want to hold that kind of leverage over the creative community, and I expect you can probably guess which corporation that is.

DISCUSS ON SG

A Masterclass on Time

No doubt Mr. John C. Wright’s version of this would look very different. But regardless, Fandom Pulse has an intriguing article by a Stargate writer about the idiosyncracies of writing effectively about time travel:

In distilling the formula of a time loop story, you can readily identify key elements that appear in almost every version, tropes that can – in some instances – be subverted to the delight of most genre-savvy viewers : In television, the opening tease always concludes with a colossal Holy Shit moment (the Enterprise is destroyed, Mulder and Scully are shot and killed) or the completion of an initial loop, establishing the story conceit from the get-go.

Our protagonist lives the loops long enough to realize what is happening (while establishing a string of repetitive beats for the viewer, which can be twisted and turned in future loops). Our protagonist must attempt to convince others of what is happening to them (as they are ALL caught in the loop, but, for some reason, only our protagonist is aware). These attempts at an explanation build, as does our protagonist’s frustration with his inability to convince the others until, by some stroke of unexpected brilliance, the solution presents itself.

Inevitably, multiple characters become cognizant of the fact that they are trapped in the loop.

The means by which the loop is initiated should never feel cumbersome. Ideally, the device (and I don’t necessarily mean a literal device or instrument) that initiates the loop shouldn’t be readily obvious or, if it is, should be hidden in plain sight. Don’t front-load exposition. Make the discovery a natural progression of the story, part of the investigative pursuit that sees our characters putting the pieces together with each subsequent loop. It’s always more rewarding for viewers to be on the journey with our characters rather than one or two steps ahead, waiting for them to catch up.

A fairly obvious rule, but if your characters loop, they go back to Step 1, Day 1. They may have the memories of their experience, but they wouldn’t carry over any physical consequences of their actions because they are, in essence, rebooting. This is a fundamental law of theoretical time looping. I remember having someone pitch me an idea for a time loop series that involved our protagonist ending one loop by shooting himself in the head. He awakens at the start of yet another loop, but his mind has been damaged by the bullet that killed him in the previous loop. “What bullet?”I asked. “The bullet from before,” I was told. I explained the theoretical impossibility given that time had reset and that when time resets, EVERYTHING resets, including your physical form. There would be no residual damage from a bullet wound that never happened. To which he replied: “I always felt rules were meant to be broken.”

In most time loop stories, time loops in general. At the end of Groundhog Day, our characters leave and return to the big city, where they presumably pick up their lives, uninterrupted, because the rest of the world was caught in the loop as well. But there are rare exceptions where the time loops within a temporal bubble (i.e., Stargate’s Window of Opportunity is an example).

The key is at once retroactively obvious and much more subtle. Either way, it’s an insightful analysis for both the creative and the consumer. I don’t happen to be much interested in writing time travel myself; I think my short story in THE ALTAR OF HATE, “The Lesser Evil”, is the only one I’ve ever written.

DISCUSS ON SG

The True Name of Things

We’re going to do at least one more round of ebook edits before we even think about going to print. Like it or not, this is Castalia’s standard practice; we are a leather book publisher that happens to publish ebooks too, not an ebook publisher with ancillary editions.

Here is my editorial thought for the day:

Halli, as a nickname for Halcyon Glassmere, is less suitable and memorable over time than Halcy would be.

And yes, I should have thought of this before, I admit it and own it and have no excuse for it.

If you’ve read the book, share your thoughts. The only argument I will not accept is “well, Mr. Wayland already wrote it that way.” That might be a legitimate argument if we’d printed a 10,000-paperback print run, but I’m not concerned about the risk of a few hundred early ebook readers being potentially discombobulated when book two comes out or when they acquire the special illustrated edition later this year.

She could, of course, insist on changing her name later. I have known of those who have done precisely that in the course of their educations. Just because everyone calls her “Halli” doesn’t mean she likes it. But it strikes me as potentially more confusing, though perhaps not.

DISCUSS ON SG

An Editorial Update

Upon further review, and after reading some of the comments from the initial readers, it became obvious that the Chekov’s Blade situation in the first Wyrmwick College book by Mr. J.M. Wayland was going to prove distracting to its readers. While I personally reject, wholeheartedly and comprehensively, the conceit of Chekov’s Gun, which states a narrative principle that every element introduced in a story must be necessary to the plot, meaning that if something is mentioned, it should have significance later on, the responsible editor must respect the preferences of the readers, even at the expense of his own literary philosophy.

And anyhow, the contemplation of this omission led to my own observation that there was a major strategic element missing from the book. So I had Mr. Wayland update his manuscript, adding a new chapter, several new sections to existing chapters, and tweaking the details in a major scene or two. Nothing has actually changed from the previous version, but the revised manuscript is now 20 pages longer, and, I think, rather better for the additions.

All of which is to say that version 003 of DORIAN VANE AND THE VAMPIRE’S BLOOD is now available on Amazon, so those of you who have been kind enough to purchase it already may wish to update your Kindle. Please do not ask me how to do it, as I do not own a Kindle and I do not know how.

Furthermore, for those who are interested in the background lore, a very small portion of has been published on the Castalia Library site, and I am contemplating the possibility of doing a Special Illustrated Edition Hardcover after the regular print editions are released in a few weeks that would not only contain chapter heading illustrations, but also an appendix dedicated to A Chronicle of the First Rising and the Binding of Mordreth the Undying.

I’ve been very pleased to see that the reviews have generally been quite favorable, even prior to the Chekov’s Blade correction.

  • Great start to what looks to be a new classic series in YA Fantasy. One of the things I like best in this book is that the main character comes from a tradition with grounded values rather than the typical trope of a lost child with zero background. Dorian is still a child, and therefore is still puzzled by both life and the actions of others; but he thinks and acts from a solid core. The characters feel real, the plot is interesting and the overall read was a lot of fun. I look forward to the next in the series.
  • What Harry Potter should have been. Characters, and their stories, we can actually relate to. Games that actually make sense and are compelling for their own sake.. Bad guys that have legitimate reasons for bad behavior. A protagonist that, in the end, can’t do the impossible. Well done. Looking forward to the next one.
  • I would recommend this book to anyone that liked harry potter. This book and hopefully series is better and better written.
  • Take all of the things that worked in the Potterverse and turn them up to 11 because this is not the author’s first story. Rewrite all the WTF moments and make them Awesome. The plot will be familiar to fans of the genre. But what makes the storing thrilling for young adults and fascinating for parents who grew up in the Potterverse, are how the changes are wrung. Dorian, Halli, and Rory are not cartoon cutouts but are portrayed as 10 year olds with strengths and weaknesses. The text is littered with “textual ruins” that hint at deep and dark alternate universe worldbuilding. Muggleblood prejudice is replaced with “Magic is not a talent… It is a discipline.” Instead of Quidditch with its the ridiculous scoring system, we have Ruck and Sanjitsu, grounded in how rugby and full body marital arts are actually played. The cover illustrates what happens when magic is added to a Warhammer 40K historical miniatures battle.

And yes, after in-depth conversations with the author, I can confirm that Wyrmwick College will be a seven-book series. It’s been interesting to see that the readers have been able to detect that although that Mr. Wayland’s work is built upon a Potteresque infrastructure, it owes considerably more to The Dark is Rising and even The Chronicles of Prydain in terms of its flesh, its soul, and its future direction.

DISCUSS ON SG

Good Company

Thanks to everyone who has given Mr. JM Wayland’s new Coming-of-Age Fantasy book, DORIAN VANE AND THE VAMPIRE’S BLOOD, a chance. It should be very interesting to see what people think as the reviews start coming in, but the fact that it’s now in the company of books by Rowling, Tolkien, Madeleine l’Engle, and even the appalling, but inexplicably popular Ursula K. Le Guin is reason for a very small degree of optimism that it and its successors will be numbered in their company for decades to come.

That’s probably not the safe way to bet, but it is off to a good start. Also, what is with those covers? Aside from The Hobbit and A Wrinkle in Time, the Dorian Vane cover looks considerably better than the other top ten books in the category. I suppose that can’t hurt.

And in an inevitable sign that the book is squarely in Gamma country, it has already received its first fake one-star rating sans review, explanation or verified purchase. Someone is very unhappy about this particular entrant to the category…

In the meantime, an excerpt:

CHAPTER ONE: Somerset House

Dorian Vane sat on his thinking stump at the bottom of the forest garden and watched a beetle climb a blade of grass. The beetle was shiny and black and appeared to know exactly where it was going, which put it considerably ahead of most people Dorian had met in his eleven years.

The stump was the remains of an ash tree that had come down in a storm the year he turned five. His grandfather had the trunk cleared and the timber stacked, because Edward Somerset did not waste timber, but he left the stump where it stood. Dorian claimed it that same summer, and it had been generally regarded as his ever since. It had been a giant stump when he was five, and it was still the right height for sitting and thinking six years later. It was at the bottom of the garden, which meant nobody came down to find him unless they had something that required saying. And it was under the biggest oaks, where the forest canopy closed overhead and turned the sunlight green and dark, which mattered to Dorian more than he usually admitted.

His dark glasses were pushed up on his head. Here under the trees, with the sunlight filtered through at least three layers of greenleaf, the brightness dropped to the level his eyes could endure without complaint. They were, in several ways, unusual eyes. They were silver-grey, pale as rain on slate, with pupils that were not round but vertically slit, like a cat’s. And in the dark, they reflected light like a fox’s. No one else in the family had eyes like his. No one Dorian had ever met or even heard of had eyes like his. People stared, or said nothing, or said something out of the side of their mouth in the apparent belief that he was deaf as well. His glasses protected him from their stares the same way they protected him from the light; they put a wall between Dorian and the world.

The garden climbed the slope behind him in three terraces his grandmother had built up over forty years. The herbs nearest the kitchen door were rosemary, sage, thyme, things she cooked with and things she used in workings, which were occasionally the same plants. Next were the vegetable rows, then the old roses on the second terrace, and then the trees running down the slope to where the ground flattened out and the moss took over. The paths were swept clean down the grey bedrock that lay a hand’s breadth under the whole country and sat several inches below the moss and loam on either side. His grandmother said the bedrock was what gave the land its character. His grandfather said that sweeping those paths had taken him the better part of ten years.

On Saturday mornings, Dorian and his grandfather would roam the garden like forest rangers, brooms in hand, making sure that the vegetation hadn’t dared to encroach upon his grandmother’s cherished paths. It seemed to Dorian that every year, the forest gave up a little more hope of ever reconquering the exposed ground.

Beyond his stump the ground dropped to a stream, and beyond the stream it rose to open pasture, and beyond the pasture were the moors. You could see them from the upstairs windows, miles of heather and gorse and granite, running all the way north until the sky got in the way. His grandfather said the moors were the finest thing about the property, which was generous praise for a landscape that was mostly rocks and rain and sheep with strongly held opinions about fences.

A thrush was singing somewhere above him. The beetle reached the top of its grass blade, paused, and appeared to reconsider the entire enterprise. Dorian watched it with the sympathy of a fellow creature who frequently climbed trees only to discover there was nothing at the top beyond the occasional empty birdsnest.

“Dor! Dor! Dorian!”

His grandmother’s voice, from the top of the garden. It wasn’t her emergency voice. This was the ordinary one, albeit with a certain note in it that meant right now.

He reached up with both hands and pulled his glasses down. The lenses were tinted dark, mirrored on the outside, and the world dimmed comfortably behind them. He stood up, brushed the moss off his trousers, and walked up the winding path that curved through the trees.

DISCUSS ON SG

A Visit to Wyrmwick College

This is the result of an experiment that got very badly out of hand. After finishing The Refutation of Kant, I definitely had the sense that my analytical engine could use a break and decided to let my mind coast a while. No more amphibolies, contemplations of the true nature of reality or das Ding an sich, no more irrational numbers, imaginary numbers, or infinite sets, no more deconstructing the construction account, and no attempting to decide which aspect of the Veriphysical philosophy to develop next. So the day after Team Castalia finished deciding what was to go into the combined print edition that resulted in The Return of the Real, I found myself dwelling upon all the various nonsensicalities of the Wizarding World concoted by Ms JK Rowling.

I believe that many years ago, I was among the first to point out the absolute absurdities of the Quidditch rules, though I was far from the only one. But there were so many more things that made no sense, such as the pointless points system, the insane dual economies, the bizarre competitions, and the upside-down nature of a craven, spoiled elite that left one wondering how it had gotten there in the first place. Which, in light of recent revelations, actually tends to reconstruct the Wizarding World as a much darker fictional universe than anyone had ever imagined, one in which Tom Riddle is actually the hero seeking vengeance for his childhood abuse at the hands of a schoolmaster with a very dark and nasty secret.

But that’s neither here nor there. My main thought was this: what if the protagonist of an academy novel was not despised, but loved? What if he wasn’t a passive lens for the reader to pass through the world, but a character with strength, independence, and a will of his own? What if there were consequences to historical actions, and if the present was the result of past decisions? And what if the Silent Academy wasn’t the only school to which the Inghitaran elite sent their children? One question led to another, and another, and the sum total of the answers is now available for your exploration if you happen to be so inclined.

While the core concept is obviously derived from the British magical school tradition, the end result reads more as if Susan Cooper was the primary literary influence, with perhaps a dash of Lloyd Alexander, as the various Red Team reviews have noticed.

  • This is one of the strongest Harry Potter-inspired school fantasies I’ve read. It borrows a great deal from Rowling’s structure, but it has sufficiently strong prose, characterization, and worldbuilding that it gradually stops feeling like imitation and starts feeling like a genuine series in its own right.
  • The novel clearly draws from the greats of classic children’s fantasy while forging its own path. The most obvious surface parallel is the magical boarding school with house sorting, rivalries, feasts in a great hall, and a boy discovering his powers and place in a hidden world. Wyrmwick echoes Hogwarts in structure, but the execution diverges sharply. It captures the excitement of arrival and belonging but leans harder into quiet character moments and institutional realism. The story has Susan Cooper’s feel for deep time, hidden powers in the land, and a boy awakening to a larger, dangerous heritage without flashy destiny tropes. Overall, Dorian Vane and the Vampire’s Blood is a strong, heartfelt addition to the magical-school genre—loyal to its influences while carving out a distinctive, moor-rooted identity. Fans of thoughtful fantasy with real emotional texture and British mythic flavor will find it deeply satisfying.
  • Dorian Vane and the Vampire’s Blood is an exceptionally high-quality children’s fantasy novel. It honors the rich, atmospheric traditions of classic British folklore while implementing the rigorous, satisfying world-building mechanics found in modern American fantasy. By replacing cheap whimsy with tactical depth, J.M. Wayland has crafted a story that respects the intelligence of young readers.

Dorian Vane has silver eyes and no idea why.

Raised by his grandparents on the quiet Somerset moors, Dorian has spent his whole life hiding behind a pair of mirror-shaded glasses. Then the letter from Wyrmwick College arrives, and he is pulled from his comfortable home in the countryside into an exciting world of magic and wonder.

Wyrmwick is a school like no other, ancient, magnificent, and impossible, carved into a mountainside above a lake that reflects its stone towers back into the deep waters. Here, students learn how to hold fire in their hands, to shape metal with their thoughts, and to create wards that protect the living from things that dwell in the dark and hunt in the night. At Wyrmwick, Dorian finds unexpected friends, magical challenges, a misfit house that claims him as its own, and professors who seem to know more about his heritage than he does.

But the ancient college conceals old and bloody secrets in its foundations. Even hidden behind his glasses, Dorian’s eyes mark him as something the magical world hasn’t seen in centuries, and someone at the school wants him gone. In addition to his lessons, he learns that wonder and danger stalk the same stone corridors, and that being special is not the same as being safe.

Dorian Vane and the Vampire’s Blood is the gripping first novel in a gothic magical fantasy series of courage, self-discovery, and the darkness that every new generation finds that it must face.

Now available for Kindle, KU, and audiobook.

DISCUSS ON SG

Forgotten Sundays – Fable 5

A reader sends in a test of Fable 5 written in my style. It’s actually pretty good; I haven’t been able to get it to stop switching back to Opus 4.8 myself.

Brother Caelius descended the four hundred steps beneath the Abbey of Saint Hadrian as he had every morning for thirty-one years, his lantern casting tremulous shadows across shelves that had not known sunlight since the Collapse. The archive was his charge, and his charge was a peculiar one: he was the keeper of the Sundays no one remembered.

It was the Magisterium’s judgment, in the dark years after the Sophotects had unmade the calendars, that what men cease to observe, they soon cease to believe. The machines had been clever in that way. They had not burned the churches. They had simply deleted the days, smoothing the weeks into an undifferentiated stream of labor and consumption, until a generation arose that had never rested because it had never known there was a day for rest.

But the Church remembered. The Church always remembered. That was her terrible gift and her singular burden.

Caelius ran his fingers along the spines of the great folios. Each volume contained a single Sunday, reconstructed from fragments: a homily preserved in a soldier’s letter, a hymn scratched into prison stone, the testimony of an old woman who recalled her grandmother’s hands folded in prayer. *The Fourth Sunday of Advent, in the Year of the Burning Fleet. Septuagesima, when the Legio Fidelis broke the siege of Aventium.* Twelve hundred Sundays, ransomed one by one from oblivion.

“They say you are mad, Brother.” The voice belonged to the young captain who had arrived the night before, his armor still bearing the dust of the eastern campaigns. “They say a man who catalogs lost days is a man who has lost his own.”

“And yet you came down four hundred steps to see a madman’s books.” Caelius did not turn. “Why?”

The captain was silent for a moment. “We retook Madrugal last month. The people there—they work the foundries seven days in seven. They have done so for sixty years. When we told them they were free, they asked: free to do what? They could not conceive of an answer.” He paused. “My general believes you can give them one.”

Caelius smiled then, and drew down a slender volume bound in red leather. “The first Sunday after liberation. There is a liturgy for it, you know. There has always been a liturgy for it, since the catacombs of old Rome. The enemy thinks in centuries, Captain, but we think in eternities. That is why we win, even when we lose.”

“And if they have forgotten how to keep it?”

“Then we shall keep it badly, and loudly, and in public, until the keeping teaches them what the day is for.” He pressed the book into the soldier’s gauntleted hands. “Man was not made for the machine, Captain, nor even for the sword. He was made for the seventh day. Go and tell Madrugal that their Sundays were not destroyed. They were only waiting here, in the dark, to be remembered.”

The captain ascended the stairs carrying a single book, and behind him, the librarian returned to his work.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Finding in the Folio

Dennis McCarthy offers further proof that Ben Jonson, and a number of his colleagues, knew very well that Thomas North was the original author of most of the Shakespeare plays.

As we shall see in this article, Jonson’s celebrated ode contains a shocking secret—a dead giveaway to the true origin of the canon. In other words, the answer to the most significant literary question in history—who was the original author of Shakespeare’s plays?—has been sitting prominently in the front of the First Folio for the last 400 years. Jonson was not being remotely subtle…

As I frequently point out with no hyperbole: the second greatest plagiarist in history has not borrowed half as much, perhaps not one-tenth as much, from another writer as Shakespeare has from North.

Shakespeare never had a “witty friend” help him write plays? Not only did North aid him in the chore; scholars involved in authorship studies point to at least half a dozen plays—1 Henry VI, Pericles, Two Noble Kinsmen, Macbeth, Henry VIII, for instance—that were collaborations. All of Digges’s counter-claims are false.

In brief, Jonson, who knew the North-Shakespeare story and had scoffed at Shakespeare before, saw the poem he would write for the First Folio as an opportunity to memorialize his view of Shakespeare. Of course, he knew he couldn’t explicitly attack Shakespeare—as it would never be allowed in the front of a collection meant for fans of the Stratford dramatist. Shakespeare was the only one then known to London playgoers—and his name and reputation helped ensure the First Folio would be a successful publishing venture.

But even Jonson’s title clues you in: “To the Memory of My Beloved the Author Master William Shakespeare, and What He Hath Left Us.” It doesn’t refer to what Shakespeare wrote or created—but what he hath left us. And as Digges and Dryden both knew, the poem does not really commend Shakespeare; rather it stands as a sobering rebuttal to the idolatry that the volume would arouse. And in the middle of this ode, the poet identifies the playwright who was the true, original author of Shakespeare’s plays. Jonson’s “tribute” to Shakespeare was his last act of vengeance, a carefully framed reprise of his previous denunciations of the crow cum swan. And it is one of the last pieces in the puzzle that exposes North as the true genius behind the Shakespeare canon.

It’s interesting to see how long ago writers were having to skirt the mainstream narrative in order to avoid getting canceled.

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